On one spooky Christmas eve, a man named Douglas promises a strange tale to his listeners and pulls out a manuscript written by a governess. The account describes the governess' time at an English estate, where she looked over two children: the sweet, young Flora, and the elder Miles, just as sweet, but returned home from boarding school after a mysterious expulsion.

With the master of the estate absent, and very vocal in his directions to the governess to disturb him for no possible reason, the governess undertakes the education of both children. Unable to comprehend how a boy as kind as Miles could be forbidden from returning to school, the governess seeks to take care of both of her charges as best as she can. But though the master is gone, the small group is not alone: besides the servants at the estate, two mysterious figures keep appearing to the governess, figures who seem intent on making contact with the children. 

As the figures become bolder, and the governess grows more afraid, she begins to ask herself: do the children know? Are they somehow complicit? And what's more, the reader begins to ask the question that has been debated since the publication of THE TURN OF THE SCREW: Are the figures supernatural ghosts?

Or is the governess mad?